Pubdate: 1961
Source: The Murderers, the story of the narcotic gangs
Authors: Harry J. Anslinger, U. S. Commissioner of Narcotics and
Will Oursler
Pages: 541-554

Hemp Around Their Necks

In 1930 there was no federal law against smoking
marijuana, and the average American citizen in an average community
had probably never heard of "reefers" or "tea"
or other words in the argot of marijuana users. But by the middle
thirties we began to see the serious effects of marijuana on our
youth. An alarming increase in the smoking of marijuana reefers
in 1936 continued to spread at an accelerated pace in 1937. Before
this, use of reefers had been relatively slight and confined to
the the Southwest, particularly along the Mexican border.

Seizures by state officers in these two years, however, had increased
a hundred percent and by hundreds of pounds. Reports I received
from thirty states showed an "invasion" by this drug,
either by cultivation or underworld importation.

Marijuana was something new and adventuresome. The angle-wise
mobsters were aiming their pitch straight at the most impressionable
age group-America's fresh, post-depression crop of teenagers.

One adolescent gave a picture to an agent of a typical "smoker"
in an apartment or "pad":
"The room was crowded. There were fifty people but it seemed
like five hundred. It was like crazy, couples lying all, over
the place, a woman was screaming out in the hall, two, fellows
were trying to make love to the same girl and this, girl was screaming
and crying and not making any sense. Her clothes were mostly pulled
off and she was snickering and blubbering and trying to push these
two guys away.... The place was nothing but smoke and stink and
these funny little noises I could hear but they were way out,
that far I could hardly hear them and they were right there in
the room, that laughing and crying and the music and all that
stuff. It was crazy wild. But I didn't want to do anything, I
didn't want to sleep with those women or like that. I just wanted
to lie down because the room seemed big and Eke a great tremendous
crowd like at a ball game or something. . . ."

Made from the hemp plant known as Cannabis sativa americana, marijuana
is almost a twin brother to Cannabis sativa indica, otherwise
called hashish. There are said to be almost three hundred names
for the varieties of the hemp weed. In some parts of Asia it is
called bhang; in South Africa it is called dagga. It is also challed
chira and ganja. And many other names.

The hemp weed grows best in warm climates but has also been found
along roadsides north of Boston. It grows to heights of from five
and a half to fifteen or sixteen feet. Its leaves, seeds and flowers
contain a substance which when chewed or smoked produces hallucinatory
effects.

Elaborate technical processes have been developed for the manufacture
of Cannabis cigarettes from the resin in the plants. Although
pharmacists have never been able to isolate completely the nature
of the Cannabis "principal" that produces the narcotic
effect, it is known to exist in the fringes or hairs on the leaves
and in the flowers, and in the thick resin that flows through
the stalk and other parts of the plant.

Cannabis grows wild in many parts of the world, and is cultivated
in India, and illegally in certain areas of Africa, Mexico, Brazil
and the United States. It also grows wild in parts of the United
States, although we have been able to root the wild Cannabis out
of most communities.

Origins of hemp weed are ancient. Rites that go back thousands
of years, in temples long vanished, may wen have evolved around
the effects of some variant of the hemp weed. Worshipers of the
Hindu god Siva were said to use Cannabis indica. In the eleventh
century A.D., the Mohammedan sect called the Assassins, used hashish
in so-called religious observances. They made homicide a high
ritualistic art. Their name itself is today a synonym for murder.

Marijuana effects on the average user are described in a brochure
we published in the Bureau for the information of lay groups.
"The toxic effect produced by the active narcotic principle
of Cannabis sativa, hemp, or marijuana," the report states,
"appear to be exclusively to the higher nerve centers. The
drug produces first an exhaltation with a feeling of well being,
a happy, jovial mood, usually; an increased feeling of physical
strength and power, and a general euphoria is experienced. Accompanying
this exaltation is a stimulation of the imagination followed by
a more or less delirious state characterized by vivid kaleidoscopic
visions, sometimes of a pleasing sensual kind, but occasionally
of a gruesome nature. Accompanying this delirious state is a remarkable
loss in spatial and time relations; persons and things in the
environment look small; time is indeterminable; seconds seem like
minutes and hours like days.

"Those who are accustomed to habitual use of the drug are
said eventually to develop a delirious rage after its administration
during which they are temporarily, at least, irresponsible and
prone to commit violent crimes. The prolonged use of this narcotic
is said to produce mental deterioration."

One of the great difficulties with Cannabis is its unpredictability.
Physicians who have made hundreds of tests with Cannabis report
that there is no way to predict what effect it have on the individual,
both under controlled and noncontrolled conditions. One man has
no reaction at all; the next may go berserk and try to stab somebody
or harm himself. The medical profession after many such experiments
was forced to drop the narcotic as a possible analgesic because
of this unpredictable quality.

Much of the most irrational juvenile violence and that has written
a new chapter of shame and tragedy is traceable directly to this
hemp intoxication. A gang of boys tear the clothes from two school
girls and rape the screaming girls, one boy after the other. A
sixteen-year-old kills his en tire family of five in Florida,
a man in Minnesota puts a bullet through the head of a stranger
on the road; in Colorado husband tries to shoot his wife, kills
her grandmother instead and then kills himself. Every one of these
crimes had been proceeded (sic) by the smoking of one or more
marijuana "reefers." As the marijuana situation grew
worse, I knew action had to be taken to get the proper legislation
passed. By 1937 under my direction, the Bureau launched two important
steps First, a legislative plan to seek from Congress a new law
that would place marijuana and its distribution directly under
federal control. Second, on radio and at major forums, such that
presented annually by the New York Herald Tribune, I told the
story of this evil weed of the fields and river beds and roadsides.
I wrote articles for magazines; our agents gave hundreds of lectures
to parents, educators, social and civic leaders. In network broadcasts
I reported on the growing list of crimes, including murder and
rape. I described the nature of marijuana and its close kinship
to hashish. I continued to hammer at the facts.

I believe we did a thorough job, for the public was alerted and
the laws to protect them were passed, both nationally and at the
state level. We also brought under control the wild growing marijuana
in this country. Working with local authorities, we cleaned up
hundreds of acres of marijuana we and uprooted plants sprouting
along the roadsides.

The 1937 law does not prohibit the sale of marijuana b puts a
tax of $100.00 an ounce on any sale or transfer of drug and makes
such sale or transfer illegal without proper registration and
approval from the Bureau. Possession without proper authorization
can bring a prison term.

The Marijuana Tax Act is patterned in general after the Harrison
Act, but with some major technical variations, principally based
on the fact that while marijuana is used in laboratory tests it
is not used for medical purposes.

There were still some WPA gangs working in those days and we put
them to good use. just outside the nation's capital, for some
sixty miles along the Potomac River, on both banks, marijuana
was growing in profusion; it had been planted there originally
by early settlers who made their own hemp and cloth. The workers
cleaned out tremendous river bank crops, destroying plants, seeds
and roots. AR through the Midwest also, WPA workers were used
for this clean-up job. The. wild hemp was rooted out of America.

During the Second World War, after Axis powers in the Far East
and Europe cut off our access to countries where hemp was grown
for the making of cord and cloth, we developed, under strict controls,
our own hemp growing program on the rich farmlands of Minnesota.
Less than one thousandth of one percent was ever diverted into
illegal channels. After the war this production stopped and the
fields went back to ,corn and wheat. With the war's end, however,
the narcotic branch of the underworld was given a new lift by
the publication of an extraordinary document which has come to
be known as the La Guardia Report.

The title was a misnomer, it was actually a report of a committee
on marijuana which had been appointed by the "Little Flower"
of New York to give an objective picture of marijuana from a scientific
point of view. La Guardia was always not only an honest official
who warred against the syndicate "tin horns," as he
called them, but was also a good friend of Bureau of Narcotics.
In Congress he fought consistently for increases for our Bureau
to help us to achieve the power needed to do our job.

The men who issued this document were men of science doctors,
technicians, authorities Published as a book by the Jacques Cattell
Press in 1945, the report bore the tide: The Marijuana Problem
in the City of New York: Sociologic Medical, Psychological and
Pharmacological Studies, by the Mayor's Committee on Marijuana.

This report declared, in effect, that those who had been denouncing
marijuana as dangerous, including myself and experts in the Bureau,
were not only in error, but were spreading baseless fears about
the effects of smoking Cannabis. I say the report was a government
printed invitation to youth and adults-above all to teenagers-to
go ahead and smoke all the reefers they felt like.

Relying solely on a series of experiments with a group of 77 prisoners
who volunteered to make the tests, the Mayor's experts asserted
that they found no major menace in the use of this narcotic, which
they termed "a mild drug smoked by bored people for the sake
of conviviality."

The report further claimed that there was "no apparent"
connection between "the weed" and crimes of violence,
that smoking it did not produce aggressiveness or belligerence
as a rule, that it could be used for a number of years without
causing serious mental or physical harm and that while it might
be habit forming it could be given up abruptly without causing
distress; in other words, it did not produce the bodily dependence
found in heroin, cocaine, morphine and other drugs.

Finally, the report suggested that the drug is so mild that it
might well be used successfully as a substitute in the process
of curing addiction to other drugs, or even in the treatment of
chronic alcoholism.

Doctors and other authorities who studied the effects of this
drug, however, tore the report apart for its inaccuracies and
misleading conclusions. The Journal of the American Medical Association
joined the. Bureau in condemning it as unscientific.

"For many years medical scientists have considered Cannabis
a dangerous drug," the Journal's editorial of April 26, 1945
stated. "Nevertheless. . . . the Mayor's Committee on Marijuana
submits an analysis by seventeen doctors of tests on 77 prisoners
and, on this narrow and thoroughly unscientific foundation, draws
sweeping and inadequate conclusions which minimize the harmlessness
of marijuana. Already the book has done harm. One investigator
has described some tearful parents who brought their 16-year-old
boy to a physician after he had been detected in the act of smoking
marijuana. . . . The boy said he had read an account of the La
Guardia committee report and this was his justification for using
marijuana..

A criminal lawyer for marijuana drug peddlers has already used
the La Guardia report as a basis to have defendants set free by
the Court.

"The value of the conclusions," continued the editorial,
"is destroyed by the fact that the experiments were conducted
on 77 confined criminals. Prisoners were obliged to be content
with the quantities of drug administered. Antisocial behavior
could not have been noticed, as they were prisoners. At liberty
some of them would have given free rein to their inclinations
and would probably not have stopped at the dose producing 'the
pleasurable principle. . . .' Public officials will do well to
disregard this unscientific, uncritical study, and continue to
regard marijuana as a menace where it is purveyed," the Journal
concluded.

There can be no doubt of the damage done by the report. Syndicate
lawyers and spokesmen leaped upon its giddy sociology and medical
mumbo-jumbo, cited it in court cases, tried to spread the idea
that the report had brought marijuana back into the folds of good
society with a full pardon and a slap on the back front the medical
profession.

The lies continued to spread. They cropped up on panel discussions,
in public addresses by seemingly informed individuals. They helped
once again, in a new and profitable direction, to bewilder the
public and make it unsure of its own judgments. This carefully
nurtured public doubt was to pay off with extra millions in the
pockets of the hoods. One killer who helped to nourish that doubt-a
hoodlum called Lepke took a multi-million-dollar cut in exchange
for the terror inspired by the mere mention of his name.